Steelie 16

The snow softens and covers their tracks. He squeezes the boy’s shoulder. The russet flame of a fox. Its snout points in their direction, sniffing the coppery coal smoke in the cold air and settling on them. It peers at them as if they’re part of the falling sky, a cloud wandering like a planchette. The tenements behind them crowd out the old buildings where the cobbled road should be and the bend of the sentinel linden tress marking nature’s boundaries. Like a golden mirage it hops and gambols into the foliage, a curtain of snow dropping from the leaves.

The lack of movement and colour becomes an emptiness, which inexplicably reminds him of the 450-year-old Doomsday Clock Von Stehle had visited in Prague when it first chimed. A skeleton holding a curved scythe and time in the shape of an hourglass.

Fasting and a reminder of Ash Wednesday, when the priest daubed his forehead with ash and with his thumb marked the sign of the cross. ‘Remember you are dust and to dust you will return,’ he intoned, before moving on to the next kneeling supplicant.

The present becoming the past. Sand and ash held motionless like the stars in the sky but also moving like the sea towards an eternity we’ll never know.

He ponders, as they keep walking, if Rutherford and modern man make time and space push against each other far too closely but not too clearly. Past and present and ever-present overlapping. The future, ever-changing probablities with history on its side. Never the same. Always different. Although sometimes we can’t feel the difference. Like stepping into a small burn that becomes a wide river, and immerses itself in the oceans of darkness. The way moonlight reveals and conceals and makes the oceans move.

The path they make in the snow allows him to think more deeply. Wondering if mankind will make a more precise Doomsday Clock in the future? Offer ourself a clearer understanding of what happens when it doesn’t happen when there’s nobody there to listen or measure.

Gripping Mole’s hand more tightly to keep it warm comforts him. The childish softness of his skin. Their fingers enmeshed as they clump through the snow and it feels like a haunting and he’s holding his son’s fingers and he squeezes them and Mole squeezes back and it takes him back to a happier time.

Von Stehle trips and his falls brings the boy tumbling into his lap as he tries to hold him upright. To shake the snow from his greatcoat and to offer comfort. A lack of judgement where no one was hurt, which makes them both laugh in relief.

Solitude had been his comfort and his strength. Grief has more terrors than religion. But Mole is such a little thing. No scrap of scripture, no kind of man could abandon such a child. His last chance to love.          

‘What you thinking?’ von Stehle asks.

Mole offers a hand to pull him upright, fingering the tweed material of his coat. ‘My Dad,’ he replies. ‘He could have made you this but better and much, much cheaper No snagging at the cuff.’ He twiddles his fingers dismissively to show what he meant. ‘He would have measured you right down to the ground by watching you walk and the swing of your arms, the length of your stride. Noting where your thigh would brush your leg and he’d explain why he’d let out a little extra material at no extra cost. He was familiar with bodies and needed no measuring tape.’

The mention of bodies made his face crinkle and fall. Von Stehle grips his arm and draws him in close for a hug but he pulls away. ‘Almost home,’ he says, to reassure the boy and himself. ‘We’ll find your relatives and a place to stay. Sometimes we don’t understand but we know later, like a baby’s birth makes itself suddenly clear with a cry and what we think we knew has a shape and a welcoming voice’

Mole replies, ‘I’ve no relatives. They’re all gone’. He goes back to talking about the familiar. ‘He saved scraps and could dress us in them. Never measuring. Always knowing. He trusted himself. He joked that he’d a Singers sewing machine for fingers. He was blind with gratitude for any kind of work. Even when it was just mending with cloth like dust, he said we were blessed. Blessed. Until, even that was gone. With little work and less money, he sat like a toad. His life holed and on hold, hibernating. He said, “The world is not so large when you can cut it into bits and strips.” But he was wrong, wasn’t he?’

Von Stehle stamps his feet to keep in the warmth and blows out his cheeks. ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll find someone. We’ve lots of contacts. We live at the crossroads of the world. Every day two-hundred-and-fifty trains speed into our five stations. Russians, Polish, Dutch, Italian, French, English and Yiddish people, wash in and wash out. We’ve got waterways and canals from times before the trains and they can take you to the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, and the Rhine. We’ve more bridges than Venice and more traffic than London and are bigger than Paris. We’d the world’s first traffic light, near here at the corner of Portdamer Platz.’ He slaps him on the back. ‘Don’t worry. We can get you anywhere you need to go.’

‘I’ve nobody and nowhere I need to go.’ His voice rose as his head fell. ‘Can’t I stay with you?’

His hesitation is answer enough.

Mole stands desolate, unmoving as if listening. He does not hear his mother’s coughing. Her sturdy black shoes shuffling across their room. Pausing to look out the frosted window. He searched her face for the weather and sudden floods.

His mum’s face was always naked in the morning. As the day progressed it washed itself in anger and the hard expression in the set of her mouth.

He dreamed of sleeping in but her stentorian voice had them out of bed by 5.50am.   

Waiting for a sound other than the baby’s crying.

Listening to hear if she was weeping before the day stepped into her body. And she seemed to remember the fatality and futility of love.

Stripped naked of love.

‘Does it hurt?’ Mole asks von Stehle.

‘Does what hurt?’

‘Dying?’